International sales accounted for 48 percent of revenue, growing 53 percent year-over-year, compared with 2 percent in the United States.

Total revenue rose 21 percent to $664.9 million. Ad revenue was $575 million, beating expectations of $523.1 million. The company swung to a net profit of $61 millionin the first quarter, from a loss of $61.6 million, a year earlier.

"The first quarter was a strong start to the year," said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO. "We grew our audience and engagement, marking another quarter of double digit year-over-year DAU growth, and continued our work to make it easier to follow topics, interests, and events on Twitter. We also introduced a new framework to think more cohesively about the issues affecting our service, including information quality and safety. This holistic approach will help us more effectively address these challenges by viewing them through the broader lens of the health of the public conversation, and we're encouraged by our initial progress in this area."

Twitter said it added 5 million people outside the United States and 1 million people inside its home market, compared with the fourth quarter, with the company pointing to strong growth in Asia.

Videos accounted for more than half of ad revenue in the quarter.

Twitter expects that its revenue growth for the remainder of 2018 to be similar to the slower rates of 2016, adding that second-half growth would face difficult comparisons to a strong performance in late 2017.

Twitter, Facebook and Google are all facing calls for potential regulation on internet companies following revelations that political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested private data from some 87 million Facebook users. Twitter itself was found to be overrun by Russian bots during the 2016 U.S. election cycle.

Twitter said it has limited the ability of users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts, which has resulted in roughly 90 percent fewer users creating fake or automated engagement through the social media dashboard TweetDeck. In the first quarter, the company said it removed more than 142,000 applications connected to Twitter that violated developer rules and were collectively responsible for more than 130 million "low-quality" tweets during the same period.